In a broad sense, the invention is settled in the areas of computer vision and machine learning. The intended domain of application consists in realistic real-world traffic environments, such as encountered when driving a car in an unconstrained inner-city scenario, for example.
The invention can be implemented in a vision-sensor based computing module, which can be part of a car, motorbike, boat, plane or any other sea, land or air vehicle having a human “driver”.
“Behavior” in the context of the present invention has to be understood as a driver's behavior, detected via a driver-induced change of state of the vehicle, as sensed by internal or external sensors of the vehicle. The driver-induced change of state of the vehicle can also be estimated without internal sensing (e.g. transmitted via a CAN bus). For example, it can be obtained by computing the ego-motion of the vehicle based on the optical flow, which only requires the camera data.